Sunday, March 30, 2008

Holy Moses! Now The Globe and Mail is openly talking about the "decline of America" and polling their readers about whether or not a better President could regain the country's "lost status". For those of you who live elsewhere, The Globe and Mail is the conservative paper in Toronto, although let's say "conservative" in the vein of a sober English conservative, not in the vein of Sean Hannity. But, they're definitely not raving left-wingers.

A few things are startling about the article: I'm somewhat surprised to see that the US still has the highest standard of living. I could've sworn that England had taken the lead. That's a good surprise. The bad surprise is just seeing Canadians talking openly about the belief that America is in decline. Are corners of the US now the only places where it's still not acceptable to talk about this?

4 comments:

Hi, thanks for the link. There's about 50 people on my blogroll who have also moved from the US to Canada, or are in the process of doing so.

Re "decline of America," if you click on the category "US regression" on my blog, that's what it's about. You don't have to be a raving left-winger to see the country is falling apart. (Although I am proud to be one.)

Erm..... so, I clicked to read the article, and then I stopped to check the first statistic in the first paragraph. It doesn't wash.

Even taking into account the possibility that the newspaper is using some outdated statistic, or that Wiki is using something really dodgy... It looks like the US is somewhere between 5 and 9 in rank of highest per capita. Egregious contradictions of this kind always make it difficult for me to accept the author's arguments, because I'm always thinking, "But you misspoke about a thing right up front, why should I believe anything else you have to say, you glib motherfucker?"

My immediate thoughts were...- the reporter didn't feel like researching, but went with something "everyone knows"- the readers aren't likely to check, because they get their information from the newspaper- the reporter forgets that Afghanistan was also supposed to be cleared of the opium trade, which is worth mentioning, because it's characteristic of the kind of epic fail at play here.

This article seems to boil down to the concept that the American way of declaring that everyone is a winner, everyone is an A student, everyone can do everything and 'our team' will always win... is biting America in the ass.